PROXXON PD 230/E LATHE

I have one and have found it very useful for model-building, I have made

100+ guns for a model ship on it among other things. The biggest advantage is that it is only 10 kilos and very small, so it can be stowed away when not used. The biggest drawback to it is, of course, that it only 10 kilos and very small :)

It is better built than your regular Chinese-made lathe however (the 230 is German-branded, Japanese-designed and South Korean made, as I understand), and the cast-iron bed makes it nice and rigid for its size. When you turn it off it stops immediately, a rather important point when doing fiddly stuff like my cannon - it saves having to wait for the spindle to slowly come to a halt.

Proxxon stuff is rather expensive, the price of a new -230 in Germany is around 800 Euros (~800 US dollars). You can pretty much get a 100-kilo Chinese lathe for that kind of money, which is probably a better deal all round unless you do not have the space for it, or unless you only want to turn very small objects like model parts. In my view the 230 is more convenient for making small parts than the larger lathes I have seen in this price class.

The three-jaw chuck is not all that strong. Of course, it doesn't have to be given the kind of work one would be likely to do on a lathe of this size.

What the 230 does, it does well. Just don't expect to be able to use it to work on a three-inch bar of steel. Think of it as a beefed-up, Mercedes Benz-version of a Sherline, with a price tag to match.

Staale Sannerud